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Poirot's Attitude To Men

squatty 02 Nov 08 at 11:44 a.m. GMT

I found an old newspaper article the other day and the writer we speculating on what was going on for AC in her later Poirot novels.

In most of them, Poirot spends a lot of time remarking about the beauty of one of the male characters (Third Girl, Halloween Party, to name a couple).

The writer suggests that AC may have been hinting at gay tendencies. I'm not so sure but I find it odd that AC had many handsome male characters in earlier books and their physical appearance was never commented on by Poirot.

It may be that it was about an elderly woman trying to understand the way men's appearances changed during the sixties and seventies and clumsily, attributed her thoughts to Poirot.

What do others think?

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burr 02 Nov 08 at 3:37 p.m. GMT

If you read those lines you are referring to, one can draw this conclusion. But there is always the mention that Poirot is referring to male beauty when it fulfils his view of perfection. In "Halloween Party" he is thinking of Michael Garfield "with features of great perfection as a classical sculptor might have produced". And in "The Labours of HP-The Arcadian Dee" he talks about the young man asking for his help as "one of the handsomest specimens of humanity he had ever seen, a simple young man with the outward semblence of a Greek god". And "The Labours" is an earlier book, published in 1947. Poirot regards beauty as a kind of art. I don't think that it has something to do with his sexual tendencies. There are much more quotes by Poirot, how much he has missed in life, because he had not been married.In "Taken at the Flood" he even talks about his taste of women. And don't forget the woman he adores: Countess Rossakov.